The best and easiest way to start a blog is to use blogger.com or wordpress.com. To get traffic your blog must have good and unique content, You can run adsense, kontera, bidvertiser, etc ads to monetize your blog.
Concur; however, if you're writing about what you're passionate about and become an SME (subject matter expert) on any given subject, you'll get the best of all possible worlds with organic, unsolicited backlinks. If you are going to market and seek links as sultanofseo suggests - a good piece of advice and a necessity - go for keyword specific text links. A good way to gauge yourself and in relationship to KW competition that can be directly tied back to how you are or will rank, check the Big G for allinanchor and allintext search operators for your intended KW terms and phrases